Breignathair elgolensis -Id the lizard with the hook, which lived during the Middle Yura, about 167 million years ago, will demonstrate the mosaic of anatomical signs, which are not in live groups, with the proportions of the head and body, similar to monitoring of lizards, and similar snakes, such as hectes.
Life reconstruction Breignathair elgolensisPoal image: Brennan Stockkermans / National Museums of Scotland.
Breignathair elgolensis It is one of the oldest relatively complete fossil lizards, but discovered.
The ancient reptiles had snakes similar to the jaws, and, similar to a hook, curved teeth, similar to modern pythons, combined with a short body and fully formed limbs of lizards.
Almost 41 cm (16 inches) from the head to the tail, it was one of the largest lizards in its ecosystem, where he probably hunted smaller lizards, early mammals and other vertebrates, such as young dinosaurs.
“Snakes are wonderful animals that developed long, rash bodies from ancestors similar to lizards,” said Dr. Roger Benson, the curator of Makoley in the Paleontology Department in the American Museum of Natural History.
“Breignathair elgolensis It has snake features of teeth and jaws, but in other respects it is amazingly primitive. ”
“This can tell us that the ancestors of the snakes were very different from what we expected, or instead it could be proof that snakes, similar to predatory habits, developed separately in a primitive, extinct group.”
According to paleontologists, Breignathair elgolensis It belongs to the new family of squams (lizards and snakes), called Parviraptoridae, a mysterious group with a potential for the origin of the snake, which was previously known from very incomplete remains.
“In earlier studies, it was reported that the bones similar to the snake that were found in the immediate vicinity of the bones that had geck-like features,” they said.
“But since they seemed so radically different, some researchers believed that they belonged to two different animals.”
“Our work on Breignathair elgolensis rejects these earlier results, showing that both snake and geck -like functions exist together in one animal. ”
Fasted remains Breignathair elgolensis They were discovered in 2016 by Stig Walsh from the National Museums of Scotland on Sky Island.
“Deposits for fossils on the island of Sky are of world importance for our understanding of the early evolution of many living groups, including lizards who began diversification at about the same time,” said Dr. Susan Evans, a paleontologist at the University College of London.
“For the first time, I described Parviraptorids about 30 years ago, based on more fragmented material, so this is a little like searching for the top of the clipping box many years after you puzzled the original picture of several parts.”
“The mosaic of primitive and specialized functions that we find in parviraptorides, as demonstrated by this new model, is an important reminder that evolutionary paths can be unpredictable.”
A paper About the opening Breignathair elgolensis was published today in the journal NatureField
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RBJ Benson and othersThe mosaic anatomy field in the early planar shkmat. Naturepublished online on October 1, 2025; DOI: 10.1038/S41586-025-09566-Y
